


This Old Routine

by youwilllovemylaugh



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: One Shot, Overeating, Stuffing, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:16:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwilllovemylaugh/pseuds/youwilllovemylaugh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot in which Raleigh eats McDonald's and thinks about Yancy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Old Routine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sublime_jumbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/gifts).



> Some friends and I have this headcanon that, before Yancy died, when they'd kill a kaiju, the Becket boys would celebrate by going to McDonald's. This is something of an exploration of that.

On Thursday morning, Raleigh goes to work. They're hiring for people at the top of the wall - the most dangerous spot, but the one place he knows he can always find a job. People fall all the time.

He gets up there, and he welds until his hands are hot under the heatproof gloves and his vision blurs with something less soluble than his own tears. He lays his sautering gun on the steel and takes off his gloves and rubs at his eyes. This wall is futile - he's the only one on the whole project who's ever even been close enough to a kaiju to know that - but something about him being there, about him building it, feels right. Perhaps the wall is as futile as his own existence.

The bell rings at lunch time, and Raleigh takes the rickety wooden elevator down to the ground. A couple guys sit up there and eat the lunches their wives and mothers packed them that morning, and they've asked Raleigh to join them numerous times, but he's always declined.

Instead, he goes down to the ground level - anticlimactic, that journey downward always is, never as thrilling as, he thinks, jumping down would be, or swinging from the steel bars like they were jungle gym apparatus - and he walks to the nearest McDonald's. Its existence is the only time Raleigh has ever blessed American capitalism. Even here, in the middle of fucking nowhere, Alaska, Raleigh can still get a goddamned quarter pounder and fries.

At first, right after Yancy died, he hated the McDonald's. It seemed a rude reminder of everything he'd lost - he and Yancy had gone to McDonald's for quarter pounders and fries, sometimes McFlurrys, after each successful kaiju defeat. it was a reminder of his former happiness, his reason to celebrate. It flashed his own stupid grin - foolhardy, reckless, the one he'd flashed himself in the mirror before he and Yancy had gone out that night - across his retinas until it burned there. Until it melted tears out of his eyes. He hated that McDonald's.

And then, one day, after four shots of whiskey and a lost barfight, nose bloodied and head pounding, Raleigh wandered in there and found himself ordering his old usual: a quarter pounder and fries.

McDonald's was the same in every country. If they landed in Manila, if they landed in Beijing, if they landed in San Francisco, Raleigh knew he could count on his quarter pounder tasting exactly the same. Alaska wasn't any different. He bit into the cheap burger, sitting in a far corner of the restaurant, and he nearly cried at how it still tasted like home.

He'd been going back, recently. Once a week - he felt weird about going in every day because wouldn't they start recognizing him? But they started to anyway, had his quarter pounder and fries ready at 12:30, when he finally got there from the wall.

Today felt different, though. He arrived at 12:30, Rhonda handed him his tray with a sad smile, and he went to sit down, but something made him turn around.

"There something I can help you with, Mr. Becket?" Rhonda asked, when he turned around.

Raleigh hadn't realized she knew his name. He gulped. And then he found himself ordering a second meal - another quarter pounder, another large fries. Two Oreo McFlurrys. "That's a lot of food, honey," Rhonda said. There wasn't an ounce of malice in her voice, not an inkling of judgment. Just a comment.

Raleigh took a shaky breath inwards. "It's my brother's birthday today," he said, and as the words left his mouth, he realized that he'd known it all along, that the date had been circled on his calendar for months, that he'd seen it this morning and cried - and didn't remember he had until now.

"Oh, is he joining you?" Rhonda asked. A second later, a young kid slid a second tray beside raleigh's first one on the counter. He disappeared as quickly as he'd come, with a timid smile on his lips.

"No," Raleigh said, and he handed her a ten, took his change, and shuttled the two trays to his usual table, in the far corner of the restaurant.

He ate his first, quickly, like he usually did. He was really full by the end, like he usually was. But he unwrapped the second burger anyway, and he started in. He didn't look up, didn't stop, didn't finish until all the fries in the carton were gone, until every last speck of bun and pickle and ketchup were cleaned off the wrapping, until his fingers were wiped and he cradled his forehead in his palms, ashamed of himself, embarrassed by the more than obvious bulge in his stomach.

He hadn't been good about working out or anything, since Yancy died. There hadn't seemed a point. Most days he sat around in his tiny dank apartment and ate ice cream out of gallon containers and watched TV. When he was bored, he ate, and he was bored all the time. But he'd never eaten this much in one sitting.

He sat there, feeling his stomach hanging over the waist of his work jeans and onto his thighs, and was ashamed. He hated himself - for eating so much, for losing himself in food of all things, for treating himself so badly. For living. He hated himself for being alive, for his mind still churning and for his memory to keep him awake at night, with screams that weren't his and ones he would never be able to eradicate or soothe. He sat there for longer than he wanted to, longer than he should have, until the sun went down and he was sure he was fired from the wall.

And then he walked home. The food still sat in his stomach, hard and heavy like guilt, and he let the freezing wind and icy rain pelt him without protest, all the way to his apartment. At least, he knew, he would be able to afford to go back tomorrow for lunch.


End file.
